Transportation Blog

State set to eliminate Dead Man’s Corner, but S.M. Wright project prompts question: What are highways for?

Are the city of Dallas and the state of Texas doing right by the folks who live near S.M. Wright Freeway as they march forward with plans to replace the elevated freeway that has done such harm to south Dallas with a six-lane, heavily-landscaped boulevard?

The answer may depend on what you think a highway is for. And that is not a question that gets asked in Texas transportation circles very often. Is a road project that costs millions of dollars only successful if it moves a large number of cars each day? Or would it ever make sense to build a road for other reasons, such as helping to tie together a neighborhood so long blighted by a past planning disaster that its own advocates concede there is nowhere to go but up.

The Texas Department of Transportation held a public meeting in south Dallas Tuesday night to showcase the results of nearly two years of design work for the S.M. Wright Boulevard project — a $151 million, two-stage effort that has been among the city of Dallas’s top priorities for years.

A PROJECT IN TWO STAGES

In brief, the project will do two very important things: First, it will eliminate the ghastly Dead Man’s Corner, the hard angle where traffic on CF Hawn Freeway merges hard onto the elevated S.M. Wright Freeway. This is dangerous and sometimes deadly corner that regional transportation director Michael Morris has said is so awful that he’d have to surrender his engineering license if he didn’t help do something about.

The first phase will provide direct connecting ramps from CF Hawn to Interstate 45 and widen I-45 to the inside between Lamar Street and the S.M. Wright Freeway ramps. It will also create allowances for a new connection to the Trinity Parkway toll road, should that ever be built. Construction on this first phase of the project — also known by planners are the Trinity Parkway phase 1 — is expected to begin as soon as January 2014.

The second phase of the project answers the question: Now that drivers can connect directly from CF Hawn Freeway to I-45, what do we need with an ugly, elevated eye-sore like S.M. Wright Freeway? Answer from the state and the city: We don’t need it at all.

Instead, the freeway, will be torn down. In its place will be a heavily landscaped boulevard that city leaders say will not only remove the eyesore of the freeway, but will also add beauty to a neighborhood that sorely needs it. The new road could be under construction by 2017 and open by 2019.

Some local voices, however, say the new plans are not enough. South Dallas, they argue, doesn’t need a Turtle Creek-like parkway to make driving through the neighborhood more pleasant. What it needs are reasons for people to want to drive there and park. Maybe to shop, to work, to eat. To make it a neighborhood with life. After a half-century of neglect, high crime, and people moving out, they want the road project to help make it someplace people want to go to, rather than just drive through.

And that’s where the odd, but fundamental question, about what a highway is for comes into the picture. Do you build a road to help resurrect a neighborhood? Or to make it easier for people who live elsewhere to get from one place to another?

Hank Lawson, featured in a short video interview above, lives in the neighborhood and says that the plan to make freeway into a six-lane parkway ought to be scrapped. Instead, he and others in the community argue, the road should be a four-lane street that serves the neighborhood residents, rather than just the 40,000 daily drivers who TxDOT says won’t use the new connections to I-45, and instead will use the boulevard to move through the area.

A COMMUNITY LAND BANK?

In short, what Lawson and others want is to use the right of way available for the project, land already owned by taxpayers, and reserve as much of it as possible for a community land bank. Squeeze the road onto four lanes — with maybe a turning lane in the middle — and use the left over land to provide incentives to small business, community non-profits, shops and more to be built along the new road.

It’s not clear that a little land held in trust would accomplish that, but they say it’s a whole lot more likely than just expecting private businesses to invest in the long-neglected neighborhood just because of a new thoroughfare.

“If the object is to just related to traffic then six makes sense,” Lawson said in an interview last night. “But if it is about rebuilding the neighborhood, then I think we need to talk about what connects the neighborhood, what gives us more vitality. Obviously four lanes is all about that. If you talk about environmental justice and look what happened to our neighborhood when they put all those improvements in years ago, and how it became a haven for crime and deterioration largely because of the configuration of the highway … then you talk about taking the freeway down and putting in six lanes to move traffic, that doesn’t say anything about connecting and revitalizing that neighborhood the neighborhood.”

TxDOT officials were on hand Tuesday, as were top managers from its lead consultant, Halff Associates. They said the calculation for six lanes over four was pretty simple: They expect 110,000 people daily to move through the S.M. Wright Corridor once the project is compete. Most of those folks will use the direct connections to I-45 from CF Hawn, but some — about 40,000 — will still want to use the new boulevard to move through the neighborhood.

Matt Craig of Halff said traffic analysis showed that that many cars would create bottle necks on the new road soon after it opened. Cars, he said, would be waiting through two or three red-light cycles just to get a green light.

TxDOT, officials there said yesterday, doesn’t spend millions on a highway that it knows will immediately be crowded. As Keith Manoy, the key planner for the city of Dallas on the project, added: “If we are going to spend millions on a road project, we want to make sure it has some shelf-life.”

SUPPORT FOR SIX-LANE PLAN

The six-lane plan has had powerful community and political support from the beginning, too. The Rev. S.M. Wright Jr.,, who has followed in his late father’s footsteps to become pastor at Peoples Missionary Baptist Church in the neighborhood, said he was strongly in favor of the TxDOT plan. In fact, he has served as a leading advocate for the six-lane plan. So has City Council member Carolyn Davis, who did not attend the meeting.

Wright said his congregation and others he has heard from want six lanes, because they don’t want to be stuck in traffic any more than anyone else.

And several other residents and business owners I spoke to last night said they weren’t sure about six lanes or four lanes. They were chiefly concerned about whether the new plan still calls for the condemnation of property along the boulevard (it doesn’t). Others were concerned that the new I-45 plan will make it harder to get to the neighborhood from Oak Cliff.

OUT OF STEP?

Still, for all the logic of TxDOT’s traffic numbers, Lawson’s plan has soemthing else going for it: It’s part of a movement across the country known as highway removal. In a score of cities, highways have either been turn down or are being considered for removal as communities come to the conclusion that massive highway infrastructure can sometimes ruin an area just as thoroughly as highways have in other instances sparked development.

Indeed, no matter which plan is ultimately built, the S.M. Wright Parkway will be Dallas’s first and best example of this trend showing up here, something that would have surprised the highway-first culture of a decade or more ago.

But the movement is part of a bigger trend, and one that has taken hold in some corners of Dallas too. The idea challenges the prevailing wisdom in Dallas — readily apparent in this project — that traffic relief is the first and best reason for building roads. Slow the traffic down, some argue, and you give the neighborhood a chance to breathe.

Knox Street, for instance, is busy and prosperous — and it’s a four-lane street packed with shops and slow traffic. Preston Road is a major thoroughfare that puts up with slow traffic but has prospered with shops and destinations all around.

Indeed, Manoy, the transportation planner for Dallas, said it’s true that there is a paradigm shift across the country and inside city hall. He said he has sent word through his offices that the city will not build eight-lane roads any more, even when the street plans called for it to do so. And increasingly, six-lane roads in Dallas are being reduced to four lanes. “It’s actually turned out to be good that they were built that way,” he said, “because that has given us the space to plan bike lanes.”

Manoy said he the six-lane versus four-lane debate was had within City Hall. The decision came down in favor of the six lanes because of the traffic numbers presented suggested that was the appropriate number of lanes. “But really it could go either way, four or six lanes,” he said, meaning now that the decision is still being debated but that the rationale for either was about equally strong.

Maybe, he said, in some future date after the new road is long open, the city will change its mind. “It could become four lanes,” he said. it wouldn’t surprise him, he said, as attitudes toward highways and traffic are evolving.

But in the meantime, Hank Lawson and the people who agree with him may be caught in a time warp. A 21st Century decision to tear down a blemish from the 20th is progress by anyone’s calculation. But we might find in another decade or two, planners here just weren’t quite able to shed themselves entirely of the old thinking.